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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone found a reliable platform in the US to legally short / take out PUTs on a crypto currency in the US?

I went looking last year and couldn’t find anyone allowing this feature. Binance had something close but only on their .com site not their American .us site

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You could do it the old fashioned way. You find somebody who thinks the value of their crypto will go up. You pay them to borrow their crypto for, say, a year. You then sell the crypto for dollars and in a year you hope you can buy it back for less than you made.

The legal way to do it would be with an old-fashioned paper contract between two known parties. But as web3isgoinggreat.com has made clear to me, the more effective way to do it is to use some crypto site for the deal. If you're lucky, the tools/sites/curriencies you've used will just have gone out of business. And even if not, apparently you can just say, "Oops, I used the money to do other things so I'm not giving anything back to you."

Wasn't ETH created just for this purpose by accomplishing these deals via smart contracts?

Yes, and they exist, that's also what the article's author ended up using.

IBKR has futures trading for bitcoin. You can go both directions with futures.

Why not use one of the on chain solutions? Theres quite a few options platfoens ib defi.

https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/decentralized-option...

Because Tether crashing down is very likely to destroy also them.

AKA counterparty risk.

Until regulators approve such things they won’t be offered legitimately after all the saber rattling from the sec.

LedgerX offers legal crypto Derivatives in the US, but it's a pretty poor customer experience.

There are options on bitcoin futures and the bitcoin etf bito.

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